Last week Fred Wilson suggested that he would add trust to his “Top 10 Golden Rules For Successful Web Apps”:
… privacy is part of the brand promise …
That includes the lack of privacy.
Going back to why in early 2010 I didn’t put Trust in my top ten – it may be that Facebook’s assault on our privacy and the loss of trust that ensued was just developing in our collective consciousness at that time. And now we live in a more paranoid state about this stuff.
Customer trust is no longer just a company cultural target, trust is a feature. Being a feature means it requires specific decisions to be made about it, decisions that should not be changed lightly.